The trading journal inside SpotTradeJournal has been rebuilt from the ground up. What was a simple daily log is now a proper reflection system — with editable entries, structured tags, a discipline score, weekly grouping, and a dedicated analytics tab that shows you exactly how your journaling habits connect to your trading results.
Here's everything that changed, and why it matters.
The Problem With the Old Journal
The original journal did one thing: save a daily entry. You could write what went well, what went wrong, your lessons, and your focus for tomorrow. That was it. You couldn't edit an entry after saving it, you couldn't tag it, and there was no way to look back across weeks and find patterns.
Worse, every entry was the same visual weight — a flat list of cards with no hierarchy, no grouping, and no way to scan at a glance. If you journaled consistently for a month, the view became a wall of text.
The rebuild fixes all of this.
What's New
Edit Any Entry
Every journal entry now has an edit button. Click it and you get the same full modal that created the entry — pre-filled with everything you wrote, all sliders at their original values, all tags pre-selected. You can change anything and save. The entry updates in place, your history stays intact.
This matters because journal entries rarely come out perfect the first time. You write something quickly after a session, then come back the next morning and realise you missed the most important insight. Now you can fix it.
Discipline Score
A second slider sits alongside the existing energy level input. The Discipline Score runs from 1 to 10 and captures something the energy slider doesn't: how well you actually followed your rules, regardless of how you felt.
You can have a high-energy day and still trade impulsively. You can be tired and still execute perfectly. Tracking both metrics separately lets you find the combination that predicts your best results — which is exactly what the analytics tab uses them for.
Tag System
Every entry can now be tagged. There are 15 preset tags built in:
- #good-day, #bad-day, #disciplined, #impulsive
- #revenge-trading, #fomo, #overtraded, #broke-rules
- #followed-plan, #patient, #high-focus, #distracted
- #best-trade, #worst-trade, #breakthrough
Click any preset to toggle it on. You can also type a custom tag and press Enter to add anything not in the list. Tags appear on the entry card so you can scan them without expanding, and they feed directly into the analytics tab's tag cloud.
Collapsible Cards, Grouped by Week
The entries list no longer shows everything expanded. Each entry is a collapsed card — you see the date, day of week, sentiment indicator, emotion badge, energy and discipline scores at a glance. Click anywhere on the card to expand and read the full entry.
Entries are grouped by week with a divider label. A month of consistent journaling now looks like four clean sections instead of an endless scroll.
Sentiment Indicator
Each card has a small coloured dot in the corner — green, red, or yellow. The sentiment is calculated automatically from your emotion choice and the content of what went well versus what went wrong. It's a quick visual scan that lets you see the emotional arc of your trading week at a glance.
Daily Prompts
The new entry modal opens with a rotating daily prompt — a different question each day of the week to give you a starting point when you're staring at a blank field. Questions like "What pattern are you noticing in your recent losses?" or "Did you stick to your position sizing rules on every trade?"
The prompt is just a suggestion. You don't have to answer it. But having a specific question in front of you makes it significantly easier to start writing on the days when you'd otherwise skip it.
Date Picker
Every new entry defaults to today's date. But if you missed a day — or two — you can now change the date and write for any past day. The date picker caps at today so you can't create future entries, but you can backfill as far back as you like.
The Analytics Tab
The bigger addition is a dedicated analytics tab that sits alongside the entries list. Switch to it after a few weeks of consistent journaling and you'll see:
Streak Tracker
Three numbers: your current streak, your longest streak ever, and your total days journaled. The streak counts consecutive calendar days with at least one entry. It resets if you miss a day — which is intentional. Consistency matters more than total count.
Activity Calendar
A three-month grid showing every day you journaled, styled like a contribution graph. Blue filled squares are days with entries. A ring marks today. Click a filled day to jump to that week's entries.
Energy and Discipline Over Time
A line chart showing both sliders plotted across your last 60 entries. If your discipline score trends downward over several weeks while your energy stays high, that's a signal worth investigating. If both drop together, you might be overtrading or burning out.
Word Cloud
The most frequently used words across all your Lessons Learned entries, sized by frequency. Stop words are filtered out. What's left is a visual map of your recurring themes — the words that keep appearing are the concepts your trading brain keeps returning to.
Journal vs Trading Performance
This is the most actionable section. It compares your average P&L on days you journaled against your average P&L on days you didn't. The difference — positive or negative — is stated directly: "You trade $X better on average on days you journal."
For most traders who journal consistently, this number is positive. Seeing it quantified is a different kind of motivation than knowing it abstractly.
Tag Cloud
All your used tags with usage counts, ranked by frequency. If #revenge-trading shows up 11 times and #disciplined shows up 3 times, you know exactly where to focus.
How to Use It Well
The journal is most useful when the entries are honest rather than polished. The discipline score in particular is easy to inflate — it's tempting to give yourself a 7 when a 4 is more accurate. Resist this. The analytics tab's value comes entirely from the quality of the inputs.
A practical habit: write your entry immediately after the session closes, before you check P&L if possible. Your emotional state is freshest in that window and the most useful data comes from there, not from a retroactive summary written the next morning.
Use the edit button for refinements, not rewrites. Going back to add a tag or correct a factual detail is fine. Going back to change how you felt about a loss because you've since recovered is the kind of revision that quietly corrupts your data over time.
Available Now
The rebuilt journal is live for all SpotTradeJournal users. You'll find it in the sidebar under Planning → Journal. Existing entries are preserved exactly as they were — the upgrade is additive, nothing was removed.
If you haven't journaled in a while, this is a good time to start. The tag system and analytics tab are significantly more useful once you have a few weeks of entries to work with.
If you have feedback on the journal — features you'd like to see, things that don't work the way you expected — drop us a message. The journal will keep evolving.